On 08 Aug 2006, at 4:25 PM, Tyler Turner wrote:
I have to say that if I was buying an Apple computer today, Apple has just made my choice a great deal simpler. Pairing a good processor with a ton of cache memory (hence the Xeon) which raises the price a great deal and then leaving out reasonable video card options means that I'm better off going with a Windows computer for $1000 less and purchasing a Mac Mini separately.
Tyler, are you a gamer, an animator, a 3D artist? What do you need a high-end video card for? Certainly not for Finale. Also, if the stock GeForce 7300 GT isn't adequate for your needs, there is a midrange card offered on the Mac Pros -- the Radeon X1900 XT. Unless you do high-end CAD, I can't imagine that card being insufficiently powerful.
Apple went with the Xeons because they are 64-bit and support multiple-processor configurations -- the Core 2 Duo chips do not. Apple wanted quad (2x dual) machines for their Pro lineup. In any multi-threaded app or multi-tasking situation, the quad Xeon 5100's Apple is using will blaze past Core 2 Duo-based machines -- all the benchmarks I've seen bear this out. I don't know where you got the idea that they are the "Xeon version of the Core Duo" -- that's not true at all.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://secretsociety.typepad.com Brooklyn, NY _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
